No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a
hurricane, in the first enthusiasm
of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should
first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A
new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and
excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his
child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these
reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless
matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently
devoted the body to corruption.

These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with
unremitting ardour. My cheek had
grown pale with study, and my person
had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of
certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or
the next hour might realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the
hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight
labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature
to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as
I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate
the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the
remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse, urged
me forward; I seemed to have lost all
soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing
trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as,
the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old
habits. I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane
fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber,
or rather cell, at the top of the house,
and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my
eye-balls were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of
my employment. The dissecting room
and the slaughter-house furnished
many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing
from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which
perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.